Dirty Storytelling Birds pt. 1

Yeah, this is one of my deck building article. I have no idea how the deck will turn out, but I do have some broad strokes that needs to be filled up. Hopefully, by the end of it all, I can come up with a deck that can either honour run or dishonour someone equally fast.

To do this, I need four components. They’re all Dynasty based, so recurring the same thing over and over again is just awesome.

1. Stronghold: Embassy of the Crane. The trait that gives you +1 for all focus values is huge here, as well as the economic boost thanks to itself being a market. If anything, we’re missing some good ports to play this box with. It’s not necessary to hold on to the favour for the +1 province strength. If I build this right, they won’t want to.

2. Doji Bukita: He’s awesome with this box. Except that people would rather lose 2 and just buy someone for full. All will be made clear with point #4.

3. Daidoji Gisei: Great! Now she can cause a maximum of 3 honour loss for everyone! That in itself won’t really propel your honour gaining agenda much, but it will make your opponent start to give you honour via Bukita instead if it gets out of hand.

4. Doji Nukada: This is the thing that ties everything up. With her, your honour losses with Gisei are minimized, circumvented entirely if there’s 3 copies of her on the table. She makes dishing out an honour loss of 4+ a guarantee during your limited phase. With either Bukita or Gisei, you can bet she’s there to cause more hurt.

5. Bonus component: Corrupt Governor: Coupled with Nukada, well, you can see where I’m going from here. 🙂

That’s the basic core of the deck. Now you can push really hard with it by running Pull the Strings or even Test of Sincerity, but as far as I can see those are optional. You don’t really need them but it’s nice to have if you want to go that way.

When you have awesome combo pieces that tends to stay off the battlefield, you have to be wary about 2 things:

1. Cards that can pull in poor Nukada 😦

2. Cards that can kill them in limited/open.

Ideally, you’d want to run meta to protect yourself from those 2 situations. So you would need:

1. Movement negation. Height of Courage does this surprisingly well. Going back via movement can be done but be rest assured, they’re going to pull the “perform another battle action” trick just to get rid of them in one fell swoop if they can help it.

2. Duty. Any samurai dying for these 9 people are worth it. Doesn’t have an awesome FV but it’s a necessary evil.

3. Any sort of redirection: Chugo Seido, Deflection. Nuff said. But Deflection has a FV of 2 so it’s less sexy in this deck.

Okay I have the core engine and some countermeasure included, now I need to support it to make sure everything runs smoothly.